Hi! The Etherea Studio team presents the gorgeous Piggy Mermaid, a project we made with a ton of love. You can download the 3D print-ready model from our store, suitable for both resin and filament. It includes a guide so you know which files to choose and how to assemble her.
We ran into several technical challenges trying to get the underwater render right. Doing it in Cycles with caustics, light dispersion, color absorption, volume scatter, and 100% physical accuracy just wasn’t possible, so I decided to use V-Ray for Blender. This brought its own set of complications: the sun light needed a 4-meter photon radius to cover the entire scene, so getting detailed caustics required tens of thousands of caustic subdivisions. That consumed way more RAM than I actually have. Plus, finding the right balance between the maximum photons and maximum density parameters was incredibly hard; because of all this, I couldn’t use the new map mode and had to switch to progressive mode.
Since the progressive method is super slow, I couldn’t afford to turn on chromatic dispersion, and even so, the render took over 8 hours on my CPU (GPU mode wasn’t playing nice with color absorption). I also realized that, both in real life and in V-Ray, objects barely have any reflections underwater. To keep the piggy’s eyes from looking completely pitch black, I decided to hand-draw those anime-style reflections. Underwater rendering is tough! I know there’s still room for improvement, but I’m really happy with the final result. On the other hand, I did the studio renders in Cycles, which works perfectly for those kinds of scenes, and for me it looks amazing with the new ACES 2.0 color management.
I hope I’ve made myself understood; I’m Mexican and my english isn’t good.
Download la Piggy Mermaid: https://ethereastudio4d.gumroad.com/
Social Media: https://linktr.ee/etherea_studio
